During the early years of the Cold War, an array of underwater microphones monitoring for sounds of Russian submarines captured something otherworldly in the depths of the North Atlantic. The haunting sounds came not from enemy craft, nor aliens, but humpback whales, a species that, at the time, humans had hunted almost to the brink of extinction. Years later, when environmentalist Roger Payne obtained the recordings from U.S. Navy storage and listened to them, he was deeply moved. The whale songs seemed to reveal majestic creatures that could communicate with one another in complex ways. If only the world could hear these sounds, Payne reasoned, the humpback whale might just be saved from extinction. When Payne released the recordings in 1970 as the album Songs of the Humpback Whale, he was proved right. It was played at the U.N. general assembly, and it inspired Congress to pass the 1973 endangered species act. By 1986, commercial whaling was banned under international law.

THEY started off by wounding our pride. Will AI end up taking our jobs – or even our lives? Twenty years ago, IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess – then seen as the gold standard of human intellect. Now a new wave of AI seems poised to take over a wide range of human tasks, potentially putting huge numbers of people out of work. And an unlikely alliance of philosophers, technologists and movie-makers has stoked fears that the next generation of AI might snuff out humanity.